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Brown: Racial equality becomes reality in Marvel cosmos

The latest bit of comic-book casting news has sent fans of the Marvel universe into a tizzy.

Michael B. Jordan — a black actor who has appeared on television and the silver screen — has been tapped to play Johnny Storm, the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, in the upcoming FF reboot. Storm, whose sister is the Invisible Girl, has always been portrayed until now as white, like the rest of the cosmic-ray-enhanced team of adventurers (well, technically Ben Grimm is orange).

This is not sitting well with Marvel purists. Let’s hope they don’t notice the Torch is just the latest in a growing line of racial transformations.

The Spider-Man villain Electro is played by Jamie Foxx in the next Spidey movie. Thor’s Heimdall was brought to life by Idris Elba. And Daredevil featured the late Michael Clarke Duncan as the hulking criminal mastermind Kingpin. All were white characters in the books.

Personally, I like the idea of making traditionally white characters black. Why not do it?

Good superhero adaptations take the best parts of the comics and throw out the rest, so why not be colour blind? Why can’t a womanizing, sports car-loving hothead be portrayed by an African-American, although the casting probably has more to do with expanding the appeal of the next FF movie beyond the traditional fan base than racial equality?

I hope for no clumsy explanations why Johnny is black and Sue is white in the film. There’s no need to rewrite continuity to make Johnny an adoptee, for instance. Just make Johnny black and get on with clobbering Doctor Doom.

Besides, it’s sort of fitting for an adaptation of a Marvel series, whose books were always progressive for the times.

In its heyday, Marvel was a company run mainly by liberal Jewish New Yorkers who were sensitive to issues of race — so much so, there were some pretty awkward attempts to cash in on the black market back in the day.

Want to attract African-American readers in the 1970s? How about a character named Black Panther?